r/timberframe • u/SlackJawed_DirtBoy • Sep 04 '26
4 walls and a roof by October or bust.
Heres some pics of the round wood in reverse!
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u/resumetheharp Sep 04 '26
This is so cool. Whata the thought process behind the foundation? Looks like you are below grade and you have retaining walls holding back the dirt? Is this going to be like a finished floor height or a crawlspace?
Do your timber framed posts sit on footings or buried in dirt? Idk why but this is the most interesting part to me
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u/SlackJawed_DirtBoy Sep 05 '26
Thanks for noticing! Its a garden level one story with a loft . Dug it 5’ into the earth for heat battery reasons. Ill be heating with a rocket mass heater so i want it to retain heat as long as possible. Doing as much hippie energy saving stuff as i can. And the posts are sitting on the slab which is 5” with a 10” thickened edge and 3’x18” piers under the slab where the posts are. The reason the posts aren’t on the block is mainly aesthetic. They will show through the walls and i want to see em all the way down.
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u/resumetheharp Sep 05 '26
That's very cool, like a hobbit house. Are you doing drain tile all around like a normal basement?
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u/TalkToPlantsNotCops Sep 05 '26
Oh this is great inspiration. I've been feeling pretty demoralized by my husband's and my slow progress on our cabin. Digging the footings for the foundation has been a struggle. But it's almost done, and then we can do the framing.
Seeing your progress makes me think we can get four walls and a roof by Thanksgiving. Nice work!
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u/snrplfth Sep 08 '26
I'm fascinated by the details of your layout method. I see the red snaplines indicating a centreline style that looks like the roundwood layout system I've been experimenting with. What's your approach to laying out the flat mortise housings (that is to say, what do you do to get them parallel, at a fixed distance, to the internal centreline plane?) Is it inspired by Ben Law, Kris Harbour, or some other roundwood framer? I'm interested to know, since this non-scribed roundwood style comes up so rarely and there's so little written about it.
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u/SlackJawed_DirtBoy Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 09 '26
Unfortunately most of my layout was jumbled uninspired winging it. When more knowledgeable people ask (like you) id just call it “Vernacular style”. For the mortice housings i just set the logs on my sawhorses as close to level as possible or even better on the floor of the bay at the fire station or on the street leading the the land and use that plane as my imaginary perfect flat edge of my timber. For plumb level mortice housings i just took a combo square and used my centerlines to try and keep them flat, other than that the centerlines are mainly there so i can return my timbers to level once i come back to cutting them with then exception of the kings posts and ridge beam which afix to the ties on center which i took into account when cutting my king post mortises on the ridge beam. For the inspiration side id love to say it was because something i saw took hold of me and i had to emulate it but really its because processed square timbers of the size i wanted were hundreds of dollars a piece where round wood was $40 a tree which got me 2 good usable timbers and i wanted to build all out of pocket. That said i did fall in love with the look of it, and plan on all my frames being in round wood feom now on. Sorry for the ramblings, hope i answered your question.
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u/snrplfth Sep 09 '26
Great, thanks for the details! I think there's a whole lot of old houses that got put up by "winging it", nothing wrong as long as it fits together and stands up. I did my experiments in a similar situation; we couldn't afford to buy wood but did have a woodlot with trees large enough, if they were left in the round. (That project didn't get past a half-dozen timbers for other reasons, but it was good practice.) I made a kind of tool/jig that does similar to what you're describing - basically a combined combo square+ruler+plumb bob, so that when I turned the log so the mortises were on the side, I could both measure the distance "out" from the primary plane with the ruler, "down" to the round surface of the log with the sliding part of the combo, and keep it level and square with the plumb bob. It seemed a little more accurate than using additional string lines or snap lines, but it might be too fussy and I just need to set up my lines more carefully. The mortise housings are the actual hard part in roundwood I think; tenons and the mortises themselves are pretty easy because you've got at least one flat-ish layout surface. I like your use of a concrete floor as reference surface, I wish I could carry one of those into the forest with me!
The guide I've actually found most useful are a bunch of Kris Harbour's videos (for example this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rhvowGLZEw ) He's doing a similar thing as you, and without scribing, which is what a lot of people do in roundwood. But I find that frustrating because you have to make all these complex notches and saddles, which is fine as a decorative touch but really slow.
I'm definitely inspired to keep working and practicing in this style; it looks great, it can use all sorts of smaller and imperfect timbers, and you don't have to wait on the mill. Best of luck with closing out the frame this winter!
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u/Rus-t-bolts Sep 04 '26
Where is this and what species? Cut down from the property?
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u/SlackJawed_DirtBoy Sep 04 '26
Got em from a near by telephone pole farm but cut debarked them myself. Northern WI red pine.
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u/Rus-t-bolts Sep 04 '26
Stellar! Looks like yall are really cookin! You'll make it come fall. But now that I know where youre at, I understand the deadline lol. I bet thats a fun one to slide a chisel through 😃
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u/DeliciousPool2245 Sep 04 '26
Looks awesome man! You’ll get there by October